If Dan wanted to, he could get that porn removed from wherever its hosted. If its drawn from scratch, then it probably counts as parody, or is so crap you can just claim its not EGS related.

You can protect your rights on the net, lots of people do it all the time. (Not that you have many rights...)If you give up on your rights then you don't deserve them, and have no place in a free society.

Aeg'air wrote:So your basically saying sharing your work with the world immediately gives the world the right to steal and twist it?

This has little to do with rights. I am merely pointing out how it is impossible to protect your work once it hits the net. You don't have to like it, you probably shouldn't like it, but it's simply a fact and whether it gets your Moral Approval stamp or not, things will keep being that way.

They may be that way but you don't have to be so...realistic about it, yes it may get stolen and twisted but we still hav the basic human rights of recognition.

="Nocturn"]And speaking of deviantART:

deviantART Terms of Service wrote:16. Copyright in Your Content

deviantART does not claim ownership rights in Your Content. For the sole purpose of enabling us to make your Content available through the Service, you grant to deviantART a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, distribute, re-format, store, prepare derivative works based on, and publicly display and perform Your Content. Please note that when you upload Content, third parties will be able to copy, distribute and display your Content using readily available tools on their computers for this purpose although other than by linking to your Content on deviantART any use by a third party of your Content could violate paragraph 4 of these Terms and Conditions unless the third party receives permission from you by license.

I rest my case.

Which says we keep owner ship of our work and we can protect our rights if necessary?

Nocturne is basically repeating, in a much more verbose fashion, something said by a German thinker on the subject back when the printing press was still the height of information technology (I can't remember his name; it's been too many years): "A work published is a secret divulged."

Rights exist within a power structure, and are largely defined by that power structure. In a society in which power is relatively evenly distributed, people have Rights, and know them well, because someone who goes around violating them generally comes to a bad end. But the greater the division of power between high and low, the less real these "rights" become. Some of you say Dan could get the bad EGS porn taken down. That depends entirely on whether the hosting service is sympathetic to Dan's cause. If they're not, there is absolutely nothing Dan can do (within the legal code, that is).

Now, if Dan were actually a ginormous media corporation with pockets that extend beyond the current supply of money, he could probably get them to take it down. Or, if the hosting server were owned by a small enough operation that Dan's threat to sue could actually be considered to have some teeth (though that's highly unlikely). Because ultimately, the outcome of questions of civil justice (and, I suspect, criminal justice as well under certain circumstances) are heavily influenced by the question: whose legal fee money can last longer through the entire court process? Not Dan's, I assure you of that.

What I am saying is that it is my opinion that the legal fiction "Copyright" does not protect Dan's work... or any other author's work, for that matter. It protects those who BUY the copyright FROM the author, and for every independent author you can name who managed to protect the integrity of his work by way of copyright law, I can probably dig up two more who were deprived of control of their work by copyright law. Off the top of my head, I'm talking about guys like Richard Garriot and the Ultima series; the Firaxis team and Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri; whoever at Microprose it was that made Master of Magic, and the title of that name. I recall a problem were musicians would sign away their early work in their desperation for a contract, and years later are unable to perform it because the studio owns it, not them.

Furthermore, the legal code works in favor of the big corporation as opposed to small creator. If there were enough of a split in the fanbase, someone here could probably get away with creating a new "fork" in the EGS continuity. (I can only imagine this happening if, for one reason or another, Dan turned EGS over to someone else and a plurality of us thought the new creator's work sucked. See also: Star Trek, post Roddenberry) What can a small creator do about it, sue? He can't pay the lawyer, and neither could his likely target, so nobody is going to help in anticipation of a post-settlement payoff. HOWEVER, imagine the following scenario.

Keenspot falls under new management, makes a "minor change" to the terms of service that actually transferred ownership of content from the creators to Keenspot. Dan clicks "I accept" without reading it terribly closely (as so many of us do). Never mind that such trickery likely wouldn't hold up in court: the real question is, is it work it to pay the legal and lawyer fees to get it before a judge? (Never mind the possibility that the local judge is in on the scheme in some way.) It probably would be for Keenspot, but if it's not for Dan, with a click of the button, Dan could lose control of EGS. Were copyright law not what it is, Dan could continue his work at another hosting service, and the fans would know full well which is the "real" EGS. We don't need a judge to tell us that.

Now, that said, I DO believe the fanbase of a given work should support the current creator(s) of said work, but this isn't a question of property, but gratitude. Simply put, the creator of a work is uniquely qualified to produce more of said work (for details, see All Fanfiction Sucks except that which doesn't). If other time demands pull the creator away from his creative work, or if he just becomes so annoyed at his fanbase he just up and says, "hey, you know what? $&^* you guys!", the work does not continue, and we all become very sad. (This fact of life does NOT justify sending out the Brute Squad—or the FBI, for that matter—to punish anyone who so much as takes a peek without paying an arbitrarily set toll.) It is my belief that the mass patronization enabled by the convenience of things like PayPal, combined with ad revenues, can do a better job promoting creative work (ie, it actually does in many cases) than Copyright does (as in, it totally doesn't). It may have been different in the past, but today's copyright law was designed with the last century's technology in mind where technology is the consideration... and is largely designed with the specific interests of groups like Disney and AOL-Time-Warner in mind.

To those who understandI extend my handTo the doubtful I demandTake me as I am